On the way back home from the Youth gathering I open up the road atlas of the
United states and flattened open the state of Illinois, the state I have lived
in all my life, the stat which when flapped open like a centerfold and splayed
down in front of my vision looks like it is about to be dissected on a lab
table in some junior high biology class by some nerdy looking white kid wearing
goggles over his glasses, hoisting up his scalpel wearing laytex gloves. The
map is elongated liver shaped, needled with blue and red arteries that treacle
down the state in a rivulet highway— blood tears going nowhere and everywhere
at the same time. I think about the girl I met on the dance floor and about my
maladroit dancing skills—about the mosh pit of bodies globed together in a
rattled cluster of limbs and elbows and movements—the supernova of youth
banging and fucking into the pre-dawn sunrise of a pending
millennium—enervating and exhausting limbs in a clanging dither of noise and
reverberation—a frenzied interior gallop clamoring into an orbital wad of
pulsating sweat and frenzy endeavoring to become one with one another,
endeavoring to become one with the searing acceleration of a culture gyrating
wayward away from it’s own interior ethos—and at this spiritual assembly the
youth bang their limbs together, tackling their shoulder, sliding their bodies
into a mass of bellowing oneness accompanied by the music of Peal Jam—a song
which reminds them what it feels like to be alive rather than the alternative.
I think about my own slip into the
mosh pit, into the clamoring soil of arms and limbs in a failed endeavor to
impress a female I had just met. I wonder what she thought when I slid into the
frenzied puddle of youth, when I dived in my boots, my glasses folded up in my
side pocket like a check book—like the green bible I ferry with me at all times
to remind about the culminating temptation of lust. In the back seat of the
minivan ferry us down the same sleek artery of land I am perusing over, I think
about that girl I tried to impress—I think about the place where I am to travel
off to, the future memories to be consummated, the sight of stammering sunsets
yet to come wondering to myself if flying feels like the inner matrix of diving
into a mosh pit in an endeavor to impress a curly red-headed girl you just met
under the din of the dance floor, under the embryonic stutter of strobe lights,
as if dancing in an agitated atomic clamor of banging-limbed youth could
possibly give birth to something meaningful.
I find Bollingbrook on the map and
vow to make it back there some day. Wondering if there was some sort of a way I
could find the red headed angel of the dance floor once again.
It is the twenty-first of March. In
three weeks I will leave.
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